Call to Order Start Time: 7:02Pm Roll Call Finance: All Excused
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TUESDAY, OCTOBER 12TH, 2010 ELEVENTH MEETING OF THE 2010-2011 SENATE Call to Order Start Time: 7:02pm Roll Call Finance: All Excused Student Activities: Senators Lederer-Plaskett, Senator Mason, excused COLA: Senator Katz, Senator Cheney, Senator Sadeghi, excused CODEEE: All Present Student Action: Chair Simmons, Senator Doran, excused Public Relations: All Present Academic Affairs: All Present Approval of the Minutes From 10.5.10 - Approved Public Forum N/A Old Business Resolution Encouraging UVM to Progress Towards “STARS” Senator Benes: I got some feedback from some people. I made some pretty good changes. So, I added a couple changes that everyone gave me. Seems like a really strong resolution so I will go ahead and read it. [Reads Resolution]. If anybody has any last minute friendly amendments or questions shoot them my way. Senator White: Friendly amendment in your last ‘be it resolved’ the it’s is just i-t-s, there’s not an apostrophe. Senator Vitagliano: Friendly amendment UVM in the title to be changed to the University of Vermont Chair Adams: In the last be it resolved you quote something. Where is that quote coming from? Being the leading environmental… Senator Benes: It’s coming from the top, where it’s saying that the University of Vermont master plan states that environmental ethic transformations of the campus and leading environmental university in the nation, right here. And then said again down here. Is that clear enough? Chair Adams: It’s good, sorry. Senator Vitagliano: Friendly amendment for adding ‘the’ in front of University of Vermont in the title. Senator Benes: Thanks Senator Denton: Where it says ‘by progressing towards the STARS program, are we trying to progress towards it or excel within it Senator Benes: What I’m trying to say is that we should progress towards STARS not actually implementing right away. Because. I talked to Gioia Thompson the head of the Office of Sustainability and she was saying that she wants to before we do STARS make sure that university improves things that it can improve before joining STARS. It’s a process. What I am just trying to say is to acknowledge to administration that the STARS program does exist and we are looking into it and that we can improve on x, y, and z so we can apply to STARS in the future. That’s why the resolution is progressing towards STARS. Senator Willis: Is there other schools that may have some program similar to STARS or have STARS? Senator Benes: Yeah, if you go on the website, right on the bottom, STARS.org, there is a whole list of universities and how they are rated on the STARS program. They’re the ones that have joined the STARS program. Automatically Called to Question Resolution Encouraging the University of Vermont to Progress Towards STARS – Passes Bill Recognizing UVM Club Softball. Chair Adams: [reads bill]. This one has been a long time coming. And Natasha is here so if you guys have any friendly amendments or questions about the bill, if not, otherwise I am going to turn it over to her to do a presentation. Natasha: Hi, my name is Tasha I’m a junior here. I was actually on the team my freshman year. After it was discontinued we were told that baseball and softball could be club sports, which didn’t happen. After seeing baseball go through the process to get passed last year, this just encouraged me more to do it this year. So I’ve just been working on this quite a bit this summer. Goals are to give the university and student body an interest. It’s one of the only club sports we don’t have. There’s a lot of girls who showed an interest throughout the summer and the end of last year. We’ve had a few intro practices that quite a few people showed up. It’s basically just to help, assist, and give them skills to play, give them something to do, games to play in. It’s going competitive but it will be fun. Anyone is welcome to come, males females. Obviously in the league rules only women are allowed to play in competition. The way we get our fundraising from membership dues, letters to the community, families, friends, and fifty-fifty raffles at regular games whether it be university games, high school games, the Lake Monsters, or donations that we would be receiving from families. They’ve actually already started to come in. What we will be hoping to get to is the National Club Softball Association, which is a recognized league across the entire country. Just like with college teams there are certain sections we’d be in so there’s northeast league, southeast league. I’ve spoken with the women that are in charge of this. A tournament they just had two weekends ago that we were invited to play in, but we weren’t a club so we weren’t allowed to go to it. The League will start for next fall and play numerous teams from Maine, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, anywhere around us. Members are like I said open to anyone at UVM but because of league rules only females can compete. Any level is allowed to come in, any major, ethnicity, anyone can come. We’re very welcoming, we have no set, we just want to be able to play and have fun. Practice facilities, as most of you may know, we no longer have a softball field here at UVM. It’s being torn down and turned into an outdoor track. Right now I’m actually practicing at the North End Complex Field. I have key from Steve to the facilities and I have permission to use the field whenever we like. When it comes times for scrimmages and play games he allows us to their fields and all the utilities that come with it. Hopefully after that we’ll be able to book the indoor basketball court and tennis courts to have practice throughout the winter. Open the Floor for Questions Senator Filstein: Friendly Amendment to the fourth whereas to change competition against to competition with. Chair Adams: cool. Automatically Called to Question Bill Recognizing UVM Club Softball – passes Chair Monteforte: Motion to suspend the rules Speaker Chevrier: So I’m going to quickly talk about what motioning to suspend the rules means because it’s the first time we’ve done it this year. Please pay attention. Suspending the rules is a misnomer. We are not suspending the rules, we are still abiding by the same constitution, we are just suspending the agenda. So right now we are supposed to go on to Emergency Business but we’re not going to do that. We’re going to instead revert back to public forum area so that our guests can speak. So, we’re now going to vote on whether or not we want to suspend the rules because the motion was seconded. If it passes we will then go to public forum so that our guests can speak. And after someone is going to have to motion to reinstate the rules or else I’ll have no idea what agenda piece I should go to next. Vote to Suspend the Rules - passes Public forum Kesha Ram, Vermont State Representative Peg Boyle Single, Candidate for Vermont State Representative Kesha: Sorry that we are late we, we mentioned to Claire, although no need for her to pass it on to all of you, we just had our debate on channel 17 so it took us a little while to get up here. No disrespect and we thank you all for suspending the rules so we can speak tonight. I’m Kesha Ram, the current legislature in the district. Peg: And I’m Peg Boyle Single and I’m running for the open seat in the district. Kesha: So I personally wanted to share a little bit about what we did in the legislative session. I don’t think I’ve seen all of since much earlier in the year. So probably many of you are new and I’d love to get to know you all over time. It is really important to me to always come and talk to the student government and share with you what we’ve done in the legislature, but also what I hope to do in the coming years if reelected because election day is November 2 and as many of you know it’s a critical election nationwide and we have a lot of statewide races here in Vermont. As many of you may know I used to be the student body president so this is a familiar room for me. I was the first student body president from the Rubenstein School so I was a natural resource planning major and a political science major and previous to that I had been the student body president from the Rubenstein Schools, so fun fact. Also, the first student of color to fulfill a full term as student body president and the seventh woman. In the 70-80 year history there have only been 7 women to serve as student body president. Just a little bit of interesting facts about student government, it certainly was a big part of my life here. Where’s our Committee on Diversity and Environmental Ethics? Awesome. I created that committee when I was a junior which I felt really captured a lot of the activist sentiment I felt on campus.